In the UK, the Labour Party has accused the government of neglecting children. The accusations were made in March in the context of a rapidly growing trend of “sexting” among British youngsters. Sending sexually inappropriate texts and/or pictures is “skyrocketing”, but the government is “refusing to protect the smartphone generation”, says Labour.

The party has called for the overhaul of personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) classes – which cover sex education. At present, children receive sex education from the age of 11 years, but parents may remove them from such classes.

Shadow education secretary, Lucy Powell, announced that the government’s official guidelines to all schools on sex-and-relationships education has not been updated since 2000, “before the smartphone generation were even born.”

Powell cited that police in England investigated more than 13 times as many cases of sexting among under-16s last year as in 2013, according to figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

In 2013, the police investigated 51 cases of under-16s sending or receiving explicit messages and images on a mobile telecommunications device. By last year, this figure had risen to 665. These figures do not accurately reflect the number of messages sent, reported or investigated. Many of the dangerous texts are posted on apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat and the dating sites Tinder and Grindr.